The state Attorney General’s office yesterday filed its brief in the appeal of the Ronald Weiss homicide case before State Superior Court. The 71-year-old Weiss is asking the court to nullify Indiana County Judge Thomas Bianco’s ruling last August that the case can go forward rather than be dismissed because of double jeopardy.
In 1997, Weiss was found guilty of the murder of 16-year-old Barbara Bruzda, who disappeared in October of 1978 from a bar owned by her father in Tunnelton. Her body was found in March of 1979. In 2018, Federal Judge Mark Hornack overturned the conviction based on prosecutorial misconduct by the attorney general’s office, also ruling that a retrial may raise the issue of double jeopardy. Bianco ruled last summer that the prosecution’s misconduct and Weiss’s guilt or innocence are two separate issues.
The case is now listed as “awaiting consideration” by a Superior Court panel.
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